Fate/Grand Order V - Salty Theoretical Phenomenon

[Velaryon]

GSSR gave me NP ups for Kama and Asvatthaman. Not my number 1 most hoped-for servant from the year 4 banner, but still one I'm happy with.

I was able to get Castoria in 25 tickets, along with an NP upgrade for Franzerker and a couple of new CE's. I thought about quitting while I was ahead, but with 16 more tickets and over 1000 SQ saved up, I decided to push for NP2. I did not get it.

But I did get NP upgrades for Nitocris (up to NP5, so maybe she can finally kill silver enemies if her death effect doesn't proc), Siegfried, Rama, and one or two more. Also got another Kaleidoscope, which leaves me one shy of being able to MLB it... though I actually want to get 2 more so I can continue having 2 servants start at 80+% NP when needed.

Unfortunately, I don't have enough gold caster gems to max Castoria's skills. I know we have Pure Prisms now but I would rather spend those on other materials.

[NeoPhoenix0]

500 SQ and 10 tickets into castoria I took a break to do her trial quest to have 10 tickets. 1st ticket back and she came. Time to start checking which of my many arts servants I have work best.
GSSR gave me proto Arthur and my first 4 Columbus... 4columbus seems kinda strange. Not gonna complain about Arthur, wasn't interested in him but he seems like a good boy.

[The Unborne]

Started out with 400 SQ. First multi and I get golden caster spooked by Circe. That hurt. Next 4 multi's and I MLB'd the 5 star CE but no SSR. Went to the GSSR and got my targets: SpIshtar and Summer Melt. Took the rest of my sq to get Castoria. Decided to reload the sq once because it's an anniversary. Got np3 Castoria now 10/10/10 with my entire QP bank depleted.

[Leon]

Rolled on the Space Ishtar banner, as i need a good Avenger and got 6 mandicardos (reminded of a banner sometime ago where it was nothing but sallieris), Bunny Ruler and Rider carmilla, a rather disappointing result given there were 5 servants i would have liked from it outside of Ishtar

[NeoPhoenix0]

Forgot to mention, got a second summer kiyo. That's nice, np2 is always really nice. Also tier 5 ember farms are sooooo very nice after dumping my vault of ~800 4star with some 5star embers on the 5x success since I've been putting off levelling.

[Yael]

I got NP2 Castoria from 180 SQ, which was pretty good, no spooks though. Then I rolled in the GSSR looking for Skadi, but got Abby and Circe. Then today I tried to get Lolivinci with 90SQ and got spooked twice by Circe and got Qin Langyu, which was a servant I really wanted when LB4 dropped but got double spooked by Xiang Yu, so it was a pretty happy roll. I still got around 400+ SQ, which I'm gonna save for gramps at new year. I guess I'll drop a few multis for summer Illya, but I really want gramps, so I'll try not to spend too much when Summer 5 drops.

[Hunter Noventa]

GSSR was somewhat unkind to me, got NP2 Maid Alter and NP3 Circe. not terrible, but not great.

However, Castoria was a shockingly cheap date, 30 tickets and 30 SQ, with a Caster Helena spook along the way.

[DaedalusMkV]

I wish I could say the same. I did a bunch of free quests, remembered there were extra tickets in the shop, finished LB4, did everything else I could think of. Played a lot more than I usually do, managed to scrape together another 77 rolls for Castoria all-told, after deciding to throw away my 50 SQ reserve and leave nothing for the summer event. That's 213 rolls counting my first batch.

77 pulls got me... a copy of Atalante (up to NP3 now, definitely strong for farming), and a million CEs (I've pulled 9 copies of the 5* event CE, and probably over 20 of the 4* ones). That's it. No Castoria, no real spooks, nothing. I'll be able to take another 11 shots at it when we get the ten summon tickets, and at this point I might as well try, but I'm not hopeful. I should have realized my big lucky streak last fall would come back to bite me hard when it counted.

[Forum Explorer]

I decided to go for Da Vinci and picked her up pretty much immediately on my first 30 SQ spent. Even got a second Diamond (Saber).

I'm deciding against getting Catoria though. She's got a very strong ability with the whole 'cancel out ignore invincible' thing, but I'm still not seeing the need to go for her considering my friend list has been absolutely flooded with Castoria's lately.

[Velaryon]

Looks like the new summer event is going to be upon us a little sooner than expected. They announced on Twitter this afternoon that it's coming on Tuesday. More info and a peek at some of the new servants and costumes here: https://fate-go.us/summer2022/

[Leon]

I'm deciding against getting Catoria though. She's got a very strong ability with the whole 'cancel out ignore invincible' thing, but I'm still not seeing the need to go for her considering my friend list has been absolutely flooded with Castoria's lately.

Exactly, She is very nice but i have a lot to choose from on my allies list

[chainer1216]

... I guess you might use Serenity, Diarmuid and Boudica in a No Gold Servants challenge run?

I've actually done exactly that, before I lost access to the account I had a 3* and under only account that I had gotten through all story content.

Serenity got a lot of use, she works well with izou and Hundred Faces, as they are all arts nps.

But boudica and Diarmuid never got any use outside of that one hotspring tower event.

[Hunter Noventa]

I realized that I'd basically not touched my SQ stash at all and decided to see what else came home...and Da Vinci-chan came on my first 11-pull. So that happened.

[Yael]

I decided to go for Da Vinci and picked her up pretty much immediately on my first 30 SQ spent. Even got a second Diamond (Saber).

I'm deciding against getting Catoria though. She's got a very strong ability with the whole 'cancel out ignore invincible' thing, but I'm still not seeing the need to go for her considering my friend list has been absolutely flooded with Castoria's lately.

Yeah, to be fair, having her is just the Deluxe EX++ treatment, using her from your friend list still makes her a meta-defining Servant (pushing Arts looping to the top until certain NFF Services fox girl brings Buster memes back).

Also, I got Qin Liangyu and I absolutely love her. Gotta say, she's not top tier by any means, but it is super fun to play around by spamming her NP and focusing her with a taunt for maximum debuff memes.

[NeoPhoenix0]

Tried the double castoria loop... Makes double skadi look like a complete joke... So much damage.

Also decided to start leveling a servant above 100 and just wow. I knew it was a lot of xp but wasn't expecting that absolutely huge boatload of xp required.

[The Unborne]

Also decided to start leveling a servant above 100 and just wow. I knew it was a lot of xp but wasn't expecting that absolutely huge boatload of xp required.

Dunno if I'll do it without 5x rates. With half-off extreme ember quests, I was able to go 100-102 with 6 golden apples. Took over an hour altogether. Not sure what it'll look like without the anniversary deals.

[Yael]

Dunno if I'll do it without 5x rates. With half-off extreme ember quests, I was able to go 100-102 with 6 golden apples. Took over an hour altogether. Not sure what it'll look like without the anniversary deals.

Yeah, I'm gonna miss that bonus, it was truly great to level up servants from 1 to 90 with little to no effort.

[DaedalusMkV]

Yeah, I'm gonna miss that bonus, it was truly great to level up servants from 1 to 90 with little to no effort.

No kidding. It was like having the 2x XP event Servant, but just for everybody and slightly inconsistent. I levelled 4 Servants to max level in like a week, and I wasn't even putting that much effort into it (because I was too busy grinding every SQ and summon ticket I could get my mitts on). Very nice.


In other news, it's official. No Castoria for me. My last 11 rolls got me a second copy of Valkyrie and another Kaleidoscope, but no cute Arts mage.

... And I think the gacha was trying to tell me something in all of this. "No, you have Skadi. Use Skadi. You don't need Castoria." As much as I was looking forwards to looping with Spishtar and Sieg to handle all the farming forever, I actually have some darned sweet Skadi setups. Atalante at NP3 and Valkyrie at NP2 handles basically everything except the chunkiest Berserker waves (or just incredibly chunky Lancer/Cavalry waves that are designed to be Skadi-resistant), and some of my best ST Servants are Quick-centric (Okita, Jack, MHXX and now Maid Alter, plus Lancer Yu very soon), and I've got Merlin to fall back on where rushing down the boss with ST Skadi loops doesn't work. And once I pull one more K-scope and hit MLB with it, I have Frankenstein and BB sitting around to do Zerker farming with a 1300% damage AOE NP with full effectiveness against everything and a 30% NP Up button for tough boys. That's a 'farm everything forever' squad to give Spishtoria a run for their money.

Am I sad? Can't say I'm not. Aside from the K-scopes and the relevant NP upgrades my luck was objectively terrible. But it's fine. I'm sure this just means I'll pull some great Servants randomly off of event banners some time soon.

... One of these days I should really get around to talking about LB4. Gameplay-wise it was probably the worst of the Lostbelts so far, being mostly trivially easy except for three fights back-to-back that were all ridiculous right at the end. But there's some interesting stuff in the characters and themes.

I get my login streak SQ right after the Castoria banner goes away, so at least I'll be able to put 20-odd rolls in for Summer Servants. Probably the Abby/Tomoe banner, since Summer Tomoe is one of my favorite designs and Abby is a good response to Berzerker bosses.

[Saambell]

Man, this event has been plagued with bugs. First on the slight side, but still really annoying, is that the new mystic code seems to have some real issues remembering which gender you have your character set to, as it frequently sets itself to the wrong one in quests. On the more serious side, there was some mix up in the coding, and the new SSR is worse in NA then in JP. Apparently, their NP is supposed to get more powerful the more Mental Debuffs are on the target, but there was a mistake and it instead gets more powerful the more Mental Debuffs are on Self. Which is a big issue as her third skill applies a ton of Mental Debuffs to the enemy side, but she at base has zero ways to get debuffs on herself. Apparently this is the same kind of mistake that Quinarus=Romulus has, as his NP is supposed to scale off Rome Effects on Targets, but instead works off his own Rome Effects. Which means Summer Kiara is doing about 30K less damage then she should.

[Yael]

Man, this event has been plagued with bugs. First on the slight side, but still really annoying, is that the new mystic code seems to have some real issues remembering which gender you have your character set to, as it frequently sets itself to the wrong one in quests. On the more serious side, there was some mix up in the coding, and the new SSR is worse in NA then in JP. Apparently, their NP is supposed to get more powerful the more Mental Debuffs are on the target, but there was a mistake and it instead gets more powerful the more Mental Debuffs are on Self. Which is a big issue as her third skill applies a ton of Mental Debuffs to the enemy side, but she at base has zero ways to get debuffs on herself. Apparently this is the same kind of mistake that Quinarus=Romulus has, as his NP is supposed to scale off Rome Effects on Targets, but instead works off his own Rome Effects. Which means Summer Kiara is doing about 30K less damage then she should.

As far as I can tell, the gender swap is story-related. That's what I've heard, but because I haven't really started the event, I can't corroborate.

[Saambell]

As far as I can tell, the gender swap is story-related. That's what I've heard, but because I haven't really started the event, I can't corroborate.

That sounds incredibly dumb, as not once before have they ever forced a certain character design on the player. If they were ever to do something to try to state a canon/certain gender for the player, you would think it would be one of the 15 or so main story chapters, not some one off random seasonal event. And even this event, several times the game still refers to your character by the chosen pronouns in dialogue, its just in quests the game stumbles and has the other gender design. Have yet to test it with other mystic codes, so maybe it is something to do with the event. But I would rather believe its simply they messed up which model to load for this single mystic code, then a explicit "the player is THIS" statement.

EDIT: Have now tried it with a different mystic code, and its still the wrong gender for me. So either the event loads the wrong art, or there really is some mandate for a certain design. Yet I swear the game referred to my character with the selected pronouns, rather than ones that matched the forced art. So whatever is happening I really don't get.

[Yael]

That sounds incredibly dumb, as not once before have they ever forced a certain character design on the player. If they were ever to do something to try to state a canon/certain gender for the player, you would think it would be one of the 15 or so main story chapters, not some one off random seasonal event. And even this event, several times the game still refers to your character by the chosen pronouns in dialogue, its just in quests the game stumbles and has the other gender design. Have yet to test it with other mystic codes, so maybe it is something to do with the event. But I would rather believe its simply they messed up which model to load for this single mystic code, then a explicit "the player is THIS" statement.

EDIT: Have now tried it with a different mystic code, and its still the wrong gender for me. So either the event loads the wrong art, or there really is some mandate for a certain design. Yet I swear the game referred to my character with the selected pronouns, rather than ones that matched the forced art. So whatever is happening I really don't get.

Think of it as Ranma 1/2 stuff, as that's what's intended for the event. It's natural they use the correct pronouns as your character is temporarily genderbent.

[Leon]

As far as I can tell, the gender swap is story-related.

Its Obnoxious is what it is and every time it happens kills my interest to play. I have at least gotten the 6 figs i needed to Ascend Caenis again so im happy with that.

[spectralphoenix]

If you notice, it's linked to where you are in the story. When you're with Sigurd/Brunhild/Tomoe/Mash, you're one gender, and with Emiya/Ilya/Murasaki you're the other.

[Saambell]

If you notice, it's linked to where you are in the story. When you're with Sigurd/Brunhild/Tomoe/Mash, you're one gender, and with Emiya/Ilya/Murasaki you're the other.

I'm noticing the Emiya/Ilya/Murasaki story is the gender I picked, while Sigurd/Brynhild/Tomoe/Mash is the one I didn't pick. I wonder if this is consistent for others, or they have a set gender for who's with who. The story is also building at the current time gate to something being wrong with the you with Mash. Though the big thing that's catching me is Yu is with both teams, which might mean setup for how they explain additional copies of her.

On a more game mechanics note, I have been having an absolute blast using Summer Kiara to loop vs all the event nodes. Two Castorias with Summer Kiara having a MLB Magical Girl of Sapphire.
Turn 1: Kiara Skill 1, Castoria Skills 2 and 3 from both, Mystic Code 10% charge. Her NP refunds 70+ basically every event node, including the berserkers.
Turn 2: Castoria Skill 1 brings Kiara to full.
Turn 3: Kiara Skill 3 and Castoria Skill 1. With the damage up from the event as well as them having fixed the bug of her NP not working with the Debuffs from her third skill, she can kill all of the current bosses in the nodes. I very often see the total NP damage being over 1 Million Damage.

Also totally confused myself into thinking the event started last Monday, instead it was Tuesday and I thought the second banner would be today but it isn't. Still at least 20 hours away from time of writing this. If it actually is a week into the event.

[Forum Explorer]

I think the gender swapping is really neat, but I'm also really hoping that the characters actually mention it happening. So far it's been just a background detail.

[Saambell]

I think the gender swapping is really neat, but I'm also really hoping that the characters actually mention it happening. So far it's been just a background detail.

You say that minutes before the time gate opens and they hit the part the characters realize there's something wrong happening. Perfect timing.

[Velaryon]

Whew, finished the event with a couple days to spare! I mean, I have some farming left to get the gold fous from the shop, and I haven't attempted the challenge quest yet, but I've completed the story, got Yu Mei-Ren up to NP5, and obtained both grails. There have been several days where I could barely play at all these past few weeks, so I was worried that I was really far behind.

I have to say, I wish these events were a little shorter, both in terms of farming requirements and also the story. This event in particular had an entertaining story, but could have trimmed several quests if not an entire couple of acts without losing anything of value. Particularly everything after the 1st grail. I liked getting 2 grails from the event, but story-wise nothing of interest or value happened in the second part of the event. Yes that's the joke, but I didn't find the "LOL horror movies have lame sequels" gag all that funny or clever.

[Yael]

Whew, finished the event with a couple days to spare! I mean, I have some farming left to get the gold fous from the shop, and I haven't attempted the challenge quest yet, but I've completed the story, got Yu Mei-Ren up to NP5, and obtained both grails. There have been several days where I could barely play at all these past few weeks, so I was worried that I was really far behind.

I have to say, I wish these events were a little shorter, both in terms of farming requirements and also the story. This event in particular had an entertaining story, but could have trimmed several quests if not an entire couple of acts without losing anything of value. Particularly everything after the 1st grail. I liked getting 2 grails from the event, but story-wise nothing of interest or value happened in the second part of the event. Yes that's the joke, but I didn't find the "LOL horror movies have lame sequels" gag all that funny or clever.

Yeah, this event felt like a drag at some points, but was still a blast. The dialogues were hilarious, particularly those where Summer Onee-san Jeanne and good old Reese XP.

[Saambell]

Took a risk, got reward. NP 2 Kama is just fine by me. Having quite enjoyed this event the first time, playing through with a NP 2 Level 100 Kama will be quite fun. Especially when I add on a MLB Damage CE. I have way way to many MLB of the gacha CEs, as one of the biggest Whaling binges I ever went on was last year for Kama. The one down side is a lack of Skadi to mega buff Kama this time, as Skadi has gone mostly extinct on the support lists in favour of Castoria. Might be fun to switch over to my Kiara, enjoy the other half of Beast III. She still has a damage bonus, but not as big as Kama, and works very well with the hot new support. But nah, Kama is the star of this event, will stick with her. 300% Damage on one of the best Assassins in the game will be very amusing.